In the pipeline: Neil Young to publish a second installment of his memoirs

Contra Costa Times

Posted:
08/15/2014 11:07:35 AM PDT

Updated:
08/15/2014 12:43:15 PM PDT

Among the books we have to look forward to are upcoming memoirs by a couple of prominent Bay Area figures in the arts and entertainment world and a new novel and a short story by a Pulitzer Prize-winning author who died last year.

From rocker and humanitarian extraordinaire Neil Young, we will have "Special Deluxe: A Memoir of Life & Cars" coming out Oct. 14 from Blue Rider Press. In the second installment of his memoirs ("Waging Heavy Peace" came out two years ago), Young provides 42 of his own sketches to describe the various vehicles he has owned over the years and the evolution of his consciousness as an environmentalist and how that has affected his passion for the automobile. At some point, there will be a gallery show for the artwork as well.

Early next year, we will have a memoir from the woman who has been at the helm of the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco for more than 20 years. Carey Perloff, ACT artistic director, has written "Beautiful Chaos: A Life in the Theater," which City Lights Publishers will bring out in paperback on Feb. 10, as the theater company prepares to celebrate its 50th anniversary.

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Fall of 2015 is the target date for the posthumous publication of Oscar Hijuelos' "Twain and Stanley Enter Paradise," a novel the writer had been working on for more than a decade and, according to his wife, had completed mere days before he died of a heart attack in October of last year. Based on the friendship between Mark Twain and the Welsh explorer Henry Morton Stanley that had long intrigued Hijuelos, the novel will be published by Grand Central. The same publishers will also bring out Hijuelos' "Another Spaniard in the Works," a short story about a musician who meets John Lennon in 1980, the year of his death. Hijuelos, who was born in Cuba, became the first Latino to win the Pulitzer Prize when he won for his 1989 novel "The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love."